The Pentax K20D gets the second-highest rating in its class from magazine/book whose title I'm hard-pressed to give. I think it's volume two in a series entitled "Master the Art of Photography," and on the cover it's identified as coming from the makers of Digital Photographer and Digital Camera Buyer. The publication I'm looking at has the more specific title, "Your Digital SLR Camera." Copyright is 2008 but I don't see a more specific date. Published by Imagine Publishing. ISBN = 978-1-906078-12-6. The publication looks a bit like a magazine but it's 258 pages and has a stiff cardboard binding. The zebra pricing sticker on it actually describes it as a "bookazine."

Addendum 2 hours later: This is an English publication, but I'm in Texas and I picked it up at a local bookstore, so apparently there is some distribution here in the USA.

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Okay, source info aside, let me get to the good stuff.

The cover of the publication features a picture of the K20D. No other camera is shown on the cover.

On page 1 (just inside the outside cover), there's a "welcome" page, a sort of table of contents showing feature articles, and one of the few items mentioned here is the review of the Pentax K20D. Note that most of the current digital SLRs are reviewed in this volume but the Pentax is the only one that gets a bpush on the welcome page.

The review of the K20D itself is four pages (190-193). They give it a 92% rating. This is the highest rating any of the cameras in the volume get. (But not a unique honor - see below.) The summary reads, "It's a mistake to imagine the DSLR market is a two-horse race between Nikon and Canon. The Pentax K20D has features and capabilities that put both to shame, though it has some rough edges and isn't a vast improvement on the K10D." All in all it's a pretty fair and accurate review.

Here are the volume's ratings of several cameras. Remember every one of these cameras gets a four-page review with a lot of details. I've sorted the "grades" from best to worst:

Each review names a few cameras that the model under review competes with. The K20D is said to compete with the Sony Alpha 700, Nikon D300 and Canon 40D. Note that the Nikon has the same high rating as the K20D but the Sony and Canon competitors have lower grades. I'm not sure why they don't think Olympus E-3 or the Sony A350 are competition for the K20D. In their review of the Olympus E-3, they list the Nikon D300 and Canon 5D as competition. SO it's not entirely consistent.

If I were a complete newbie to the digital SLR concept and picked up this mag for shopping advice, I think I'd want to give the Olympus E-3 serious consideration and if I didn't have enough money for that, I'd look at the E-510 which costs less than half as much and comes with two lenses. Right now on Amazon.com the E-3 is going for about $400 more than the K20D; the E-510 on the other hand costs half what the K20D costs. Of course the Olympus cameras have four-thirds sensors. But I'm not sure what that really means to anybody right now.

Anyway, if I didn't buy an Olympus, and if I didn't buy Canon or Nikon just because of the name, then I'd look seriously at the Pentax K20D, based on their reviews. It comes off pretty well in these comparisons.

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What bothers me about Pentax's position in the market, always, is that it's got to make its way on excellence alone, and that's awfully hard. The Olympus has the "gimmick" of the four-thirds system. The badly rated Sigma has the Foveon sensor. Nikon and Canon have the advantage of being Nikon and Canon. Pentax is simply an old camera company that makes conventional, very good cameras and lenses. I guess that's enough to maintain a small part of the market. I don't think it's enough to pose a threat to anybody.

Thanks for the report Will. Your comments on Pentax's market position are spot on IMO. That leaves them in a real bind when it comes to pricing. Because of how the market perceives them they need to be priced 10-15% below the big two and they haven't done that with the k20D/200D. I'm afraid the higher pricing will further erode their market share.

It looks like Pentax Europe is more aggressive on the hard copy end of advertising than the U.S. division and the ads I've seen are very well done.